Nordic Book Club, May 2026

Join us in May as we read There Lives a Young Girl In Me Who Will Not Die by Danish author Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. This is a collection of Ditlevsen's poems written throughout her life.

From the publisher (Farrar, Straus & Giroux):

From one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, the author of the acclaimed Copenhagen Trilogy, comes There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, a major volume of selected poetry written throughout Tove Ditlevsen’s life. Infused with the same wry nihilism, quiet intensity, dark humor, and crystalline genius that readers savor in her prose, these are heartbreak poems, childhood poems, self-portraits, death poems, wounded poems, confessional poems, and love poems―poems that stare into the surfaces that seduce and deceive us. They describe childhood, longing, loss, and memory, obsessively tracing their imprints and intrusions upon everyday life. With…